Sunday, October 21, 2007

Atmospheric Writing

Lately, perhaps with my focus on the need for fall atmosphere, I've been thinking about atmosphere in writing. Sometimes I look at the writing of others and learn little lessons, even if those writers happen to be far younger than I.

I don't recall that my writing was particularly good when I was in grade school, although I know I had a fairly large vocabulary, and that I loved to read. I'm not sure why I'm always surprised when children write well, since I see examples all the time. The latest is this poem my son wrote in his third grade class--an acrostic.

GHOSTS

Grouchy goblin sitting in a coffin, waiting for its prey;Howling creatures coming for me.Owls gliding in the dark night sky.Slimy locusts creeping up my oozing leg.Trees broken and dead--makes a great place for a witch's bed.

I thought this was pretty neat, but I'm sure that third grade teachers the world over could tell me that nine-year-olds are terrific writers. In any case, I love the fact that their teacher, Mrs. Fogarty, obviously told them to use imagery, and this piece comes alive with it.

One of my favorite poems from childhood was Alfred Noyes' THE HIGHWAYMAN. One of the best lines described the sky during the highwayman's midnight ride: "The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon stormy seas." I think of lines like that every time I see the power of visual and sensory imagery. Sometimes I need to be reminded to weave it into my own work. :)

9 comments:

Very nice poem. Appropriately spooky and shivery. I especially like the oozing leg. Tell your son well done and it scared this Halloween lover! Kudos to you as well, Julia, for having nurtured this budding writer.

It did horrify me as a child, Eric, especially because we had children's encyclopedias complete with artist's renderings, and the landlord's daughter was depicted tied to a chair with a gun against her chest, and I don't know if I imagined it, but I recall a picture with flowing blood, which made an impact on my impressionable soul. :)

Someone ought to give that kid a publishing deal. When I saw the title of your comment, I was going to post a paragraph from Peter Temple's Dead Point that I recently posted on my blog. No need for that now, thanks to your little haiku-spouting William Carlos Williams of a nine-year-old son.

What the heck, here's the Temple anyway:

“On a grey, whipped Wednesday in early winter, men in long coats came out and shot Renoir where he stood, noble, unbalanced, a foreleg hanging. In the terminating jolt of the bolt, many dreams died.”=================== Detectives Beyond Borders"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home" http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

I've written lots about Peter Temple, one of my big discoveries since I started my blog. I posted that excerpt as part of post about prose style, which may be appropriate to your discussion. Here's the post: http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2007/10/old-style-new-style-and-tough-question.html============== Detectives Beyond Borders"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home" http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

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Mark Twain on Writing

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."